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Comforting Talk

Like most fiction writers, I suppose, I’m drawn toward hypotheticals, typically of a sort associated with childhood. I enjoy posing them to my friends: What’s the first thing you’d buy after winning lotto? If you could wake up tomorrow as a musical virtuoso, which instrument would you choose? Barred by law from your current line of work, what profession would you take up?

Though few decent-paying jobs seem less appealing than being a modern sound-bite-bitten politician, I do fantasize about speech-writing. (If John Kerry asked you what to say about …) Likewise, though laughably unsuited to be anyone’s minister, I sometimes outline possible sermons.

I’d have supposed that my chances of winning the lotto were greater than those of my being asked to give a sermon. But a friend of mine belongs to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Harvard, Massachusetts, whose minister went on sabbatical. Guest speakers were being arranged. Would I like to give a sermon on March 16, 2014? I chose “comfort” as my topic.

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I take comfort for its breadth of associations—everything from low to high, ridiculous to sublime, selfish to selfless. At its most mundane, synonymous with “fun,” the word frequents a zone where personal responsibility falls away, fleeting pleasures reign, and the future will take care of itself. Wikipedia defines “comfort food” as “soft in consistency, and rich in calories.”

This treacherous comfort soon yields to its opposite—the moment when your conscience needles you for consuming something fattening and unhealthful. New Englanders are known for their uneasiness with live-for-today behavior. Born sufferers, we accept hardship as our fated lot—otherwise, why live here? Doesn’t a long winter, like the miserable one we recently endured, provide us with a ready moral superiority? Oh, it’s fine for those Californians, those Floridians, to laze in midwinter on some sunny beach, peeling oranges and applying sunscreen to their bare limbs, but we—we’re of a more ascetic and sombre stock.

Such notions have a distinguished local lineage. In “Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England,” published in 1740, the theologian Jonathan Edwards wrote, “Comfort is to be held forth to sinners, under awakenings of conscience…. But comfort is not to be administered to them, in their present state, as anything they have now any title to, while out of Christ. No comfort is to be administered”—to those out of Christ—“but ministers should, in such cases, strive to their utmost to take all such comforts from them.” The proper goal of anyone standing at a pulpit, as I do now, is to incite discomfort.

Or consider “false comfort,” a phrase so common that a Google search turns up more than seventy thousand hits. We don’t regularly speak of “false fun” or “false pleasure” or “false enjoyment.” But “false comfort” is there to remind us to distrust our senses: “You may think this feels good …”

Still, we cling to comfort in our most troubled and our most elevated moments. It’s an invaluable term when dealing with bereavement, as anyone who has sent a condolence letter knows. We write, “You were such a comfort to her in her illness”; “You comforted him so much in his final years.”

This is comfort evoking the word’s Latin roots—the strong “fort” lodged also in “fortitude” and “fortify.” This comfort lies miles from comfort food. (That is a creature comfort, and perhaps it is our duty to overcome the creature—the naked animal—within.) This other comfort may be our most profound gift to one another: solace and reassurance to someone confronting the cryptic, terrifying aloneness of death. Here is durability in the face of dissolution: the knowledge, for the dying, of having stirred a devotion and a gratitude that will outlast his own existence.

Rife with contradiction, comfort seems most contradictory—most rich and wonderful—in the domain of art. A late friend of mine, a museum curator, confessed that he’d once stood before Rembrandt’s portrait of Lucretia, in the National Gallery, with down-streaming tears. Obviously, my friend found the painting painful and yet, he said, mysteriously comforting. On its face, it’s a far from consoling painting. A beautiful woman stands with a long, slender knife in her right hand, about to plunge it in her breast. Having been threatened with rape by the tyrant Sextus Tarquinius, she has chosen suicide to protect her honor.

All the comfort resides in Rembrandt’s artistry. We marvel over the painstaking beauty of Lucretia’s bejewelled robe and the lifelike shadows playing over her open left hand, which seems pathetically to implore divine mercy, and the delicacy of her upper chest, which a flashing blade will presently penetrate. Most of all, we marvel over her eyes, which harbor as much sadness as any eyes I’ve ever seen, in life or films or paintings.

The story of Lucretia, perhaps apocryphal, is from the sixth century B.C.E. Rembrandt, in seventeenth-century Holland, was voyaging back more than two thousand years in order to say to her, in effect, I am beside you, and I share your pain. He says, To the injustice you suffer I bring a compensatory loveliness. Now, it’s one thing for a dying person to take comfort in the allegiance and the devotion of family or friends, but it’s another thing when allegiance and devotion flow between strangers separated by millennia. How unimaginable to the dying!

How could Lucretia, on the brink of suicide, possibly envision that, two thousand years in the future, a small, homely man in a cold northern studio, himself destined for an unmarked grave, would memorialize her beauty and her martyrdom? A fatal injustice was once committed against a virtuous woman, and this can never be effaced. But art steps in—centuries later, even millennia later—to pay what tribute it can, and there is comfort in this.

Not all unexpected comforts have so dire a source. “Mysteriously comforted” might describe my response, as a seventh grader, to Dionne Warwick’s “Walk On By.” Having grown up in Detroit, I think of it as a Motown song, though it was recorded in New York, with music by Burt Bacharach and lyrics by Hal David. Back then, I had a paper route for the Detroit News, and I siphoned my meagre profits into a jukebox in a Big Boy restaurant at Ten Mile and Woodward:

Foolish pride That’s all that I have left So let me hide The tears and sadness you gave me When you said goodbye, when you said goodbye

So walk on by, don’t stop Walk on by, don’t stop Now you really gotta go, so walk on by

I found this plenty comforting. The mood is intensely solitary. Unlike so many torch songs, in which a jilted victim asks an absconding lover to contemplate the anguish of desertion, this lyric says, Go away. It says, I’ll hide the pain you brought me. And yet we—the song’s listeners—see that pain. We alone are invited into that queer realm of art where one stranger’s pain is regularly, willingly assumed by another.

Something similar occurs in the untitled E. E. Cummings sonnet that begins, “It may not always be so.” The first eight lines acknowledge an excruciating truth: the woman whom the poet adores may eventually love somebody else. He pictures her in bed, her hair sprawled on another man’s shoulder. Here are the last six lines:

If this should be, I say if this should be— you of my heart send me a little word that I may go unto him and take his hands, saying, Accept all happiness from me. Then shall I turn my face and hear one bird sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

Unrelievedly bleak, it seems. Yet there’s comfort here, too: What is that bird’s wretched cry but the masterly note of the poet who has not neglected his music? It turns out that Cummings is showing his adherence not merely to his lost love but also to a different love, faithful and reciprocated. The poem sings of the rewards of a dedication to craftsmanship. Cummings is paying homage to an Italian poetic form—the sonnetto—whose roots go back seven hundred years. Though our poet seems at first to be left with nothing, he has not been left with nothing—he retains an artistic impulse that repays him, year by year, with the creation of beautiful verses. Art may be, as in Rembrandt’s Lucretia, intertwined with questions of injustice. But it’s concerned with justice, too, in all sorts of ways, not least the one whereby a craftsman’s toil is faithfully requited.

Nowhere is comfort more complex than in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the mid-eighteen-sixties, Hopkins, in his early twenties, converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, and he eventually became a Jesuit priest. He was a great sonneteer—he wrote thirty-one of them, many of which make for harrowing reading. One begins:

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee, but Sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? And why must Disappointment all I endeavor end? Were thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How would thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost?

This is Job’s question, and it’s painful to contemplate that Hopkins’s prayer went unanswered—he was miserable and lonely and depressed for much of his too short life.

Hopkins wrote seven so-called “terrible sonnets,” in which he argues with God. They are “terrible” in the mostly outdated sense, suffused with terror, which Cummings evokes when his bird sings “terribly afar in the lost lands.” In one sonnet, Hopkins takes up the notion of comfort directly: “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee …”

It’s only the first line, and already we’ve struck an obstacle. Hopkins seems to be calling despair a comfort, though we generally consider despair antithetical to comfort. But, in Hopkins’s world, despair represents the easy path; it’s a temptation that distances him from God and from the thorny theological issues that God contrives. Hopkins must do the harder thing: he must lodge his faith in a divine justice invisible to him.

Hopkins can be difficult, sometimes all but impenetrable, but what is first apparent in “Carrion Comfort” is the torment of a man who, as the last line says, “lay wrestling with (My God!) my God.” The reader also comes to see that nobody who did not profoundly love the clangor produced by words set beside words—and who did not love still better the harmony when word is artfully subordinated to word, when a phrase, a sentence starts to sing—could write so affectingly.

Perhaps the most terrible of the terrible sonnets begins, “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief …” The poem asks, of God, “Comforter, where, where is your comforting?” But, if Hopkins is caught in a hell, there is nonetheless an odd solace here for us, his readers. We can’t help but feel inspired, heartened—comforted—to see a soul in extremis still creating brilliant wordplay, still working thrilling variations into the sonnet form. It seems that in words there is comfort beyond words. The impulse of art hasn’t abandoned Hopkins, though everything else has. Art sometimes can appear to be a luxury, created in leisure and physical ease and favorable surroundings. But, in Hopkins’s darkest moments, art was no luxury—it was an essential activity.

I can’t imagine any future, however extreme the hypotheticals one poses, in which readers will not find solace at the thought of this anguished man taking such scrupulous care with the formal demands of the sonnet, even while extravagantly innovating with metre and diction and syntax. Those strange rhythms of Hopkins are a heartbeat that fibrillates wildly. The pulse is erratic and alarming and vulnerable—and nothing on Earth will silence it.